BrainChains

What is your most important tool to be successful as a professional? Your brain!What do you know about your thinking brain that's useful for your everyday work? Nothing.The sad result: you ruin the performance of your magnificent brain, and obstruct the matchless potential of your brain-ICT collaboration (Information and Communication Technologies).Taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of your brain you will also get the best results from your brain-ICT synergy.

In this blog I will mix recent discoveries with useful practical consequences, and ideas from my book "BRAINCHAINS.Discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyperconnected multitasking world".

Friday, June 20, 2014

This gigantic network of
80 billion neurons having between 1000 and 400,000 connections each, functions
without a central decision maker. The information is not located in the cells
but in the connections. All brain cells
are active and work together at the same time. Together they carry out tens of
thousands of tasks simultaneously, without any central control and without us
being aware of this. This gigantic network of networks of networks has no
central decision maker. The most important central organ is a clock, our
biological clock that synchronizes these trillions of interactions. It is a
most beautiful example of what IT specialists call distributed computing, with a sophistication that is
way beyond anything we can achieve with the most modern computers and computer
networks, even the world wide ones.

Another superior feature of our brain is that it is
amazingly fault tolerant. We can lose many cells through natural ageing or by
accident, without impairing the whole system. This is possible because the
brain continuously programs and reprograms itself, it wires and rewires itself,
and it can change itself and heal itself, especially while we sleep. This is
done all the time for individual cells or groups of cells and connections, but
even big parts of the brain can take over the function of completely different
parts. This way the normal losing of neurons with aging has no negative
consequences. Such an amazing fault tolerance is still a faraway dream for
computers, where one faulty transistor can wreck a computer chip[1].

Prof Dr Theo Compernolle's most recent book is "BRAINCHAINS. Discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyperconnected multitasking world".
Available at Amazon.com or a bookstore near you. More info at www.BrainChains.org

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

You certainly
heard stories about computers 80 billion neurons plus 80 billion glia, brings
the total number of brain cells that help us to process data to about ± 160 billion, or 160,000
million. This is 48 times more than the number of people on earth
connected to the Internet in 2012. It is half the number of all the stars in
the Milky Way.

The neurons
that play the lead role are linked with 1,000 to 400,000 other neurons. This gives us more than 8 quadrillion ever
changing connections if we take an
average of 100.000 connections. At the tip of each connection we have a kind of
chemical transistors (vesicles) that make a connection when the current in the
cell reaches a particular threshold. If we take an average of 50 active ones,
this means that we have 400 quadrillion transistors in our brain. Are you still with me?

If one of you is a mathematician, I’d love you to compute
how many possible combinations and permutations are possible with 8 quadrillion
connections. I am totally lost in these astronomical numbers.

The human brain
is so mind-boggling in fact that even for a human brain it is, for the time
being, impossible to fully understand it. spiNNaker is one of the most sophisticated
brain simulators. It’s unbelievable yet true: The inventors of a computer that
primitively mimics 1% of the brain are proud that their custom-built chips use
only 1 Watt each, and that the computer, when finished, will consume only
50,000 Watt and weigh only 900 pounds[1].
Hence a computer that very primitively mimics the working of a human brain would
be the size of a big plane hangar, weigh a massive 40,000 tons and consume
roughly all the megawatts of 4 nuclear power plants. And yet you carry more
than that amount of computing power around in your skull as only 3 pounds of
wetware consuming a mere 30 Watt!

Do you agree
now that the human brain is utterly amazing, totally unique and still far
superior to the fantastic Information and Communication Technology we built?

Prof Dr Theo Compernolle's most recent book is "BRAINCHAINS. Discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyperconnected multitasking world".
Available at Amazon.com or a bookstore near you. More info at www.BrainChains.org

The 80 billion neurons have between 1000 and 400,000
connections. The information is not located in the cells but in the
connections. All brain cells are active
and work together at the same time. Together they carry out tens of thousands
of tasks simultaneously, without any central control and without us being aware
of this. This gigantic network of networks of networks has no central decision
maker. The most important central organ is a clock, our biological clock that
synchronizes these trillions of interactions. It is a most beautiful example of
what IT specialists call distributed computing, with a sophistication that is
way beyond anything we can achieve with the most modern computers and computer
networks, even the world wide ones.

Another superior feature of our brain is that it is
amazingly fault tolerant. We can lose many cells through natural ageing or by
accident, without impairing the whole system. This is possible because the
brain continuously programs and reprograms itself, it wires and rewires itself,
and it can change itself and heal itself, especially while we sleep. This is
done all the time for individual cells or groups of cells and connections, but
even big parts of the brain can take over the function of completely different
parts. This way the normal losing of neurons with aging has no negative
consequences. Such an amazing fault tolerance is still a faraway dream for
computers, where one faulty transistor can wreck a computer chip[1].

In our brain we have 80 billion (older text books often
mention 100 billion) information processing cells: neurons (from the Greek word for string), of some 10,000 different types.
Each neuron cell functions like a small computer or microprocessor processing
electrical signals. At the same time each cell is also acting as a chemical
factory, sending chemical signals to other cells. These chemicals are called
neuro-transmitters: they transmit messages from
one neuron to another. The cells influence each other and the
connections between other cells. An important neuro-transmitter is dopamine, which among other things gives us a feeling
of excitement. Others are similar to opium, which among many other things kills
pain and gives us a feeling of satisfaction. We will discuss these later to
better understand why it is so difficult to disconnect from the Internet and
why many people become really addicted to it.

Our brain also has some 80 billion Glia cells. Until recently scientists
thought that the Glia cells only provided structural support, metabolic
support, insulation and a matrix for development. Since our neurons are not
regularly replaced like most other cells in our body, they have to be kept in
shape and nurtured caringly by these Glia cells. Now scholars are beginning to
discover that these cells also play a role in the information processing of our
brain because they influence the connections between the neurons[1]. These Glia cells also control
waste management. You can easily imagine how very important this is given that
the brain cells produce and release chemicals all the time. Most of this waste
management happens during sleep. If there is enough interest in this blog, I am
willing to explain this later. Let me know.

In my next blog I will explain the computing power of our
brain. Prepare yourself for huge numbers. Maybe you can try a guess: 80 billion
neurons, have between 1,000 and 400,000 connections each that fire up to 500
times/second. Do the math to find out how many possible combinations this
gives.

The real heart of the ICT revolution is that,
together, the power of modern ICT combined with the unique ability of the human
brain to reflect can lead to insights and knowledge that separately they never
can or ever will realize. The combination of, on the one hand, the digital
processing, storing and networking power of modern computers that make massive
amounts of data and information easy to retrieve and process and, on the other
hand, the unique reflecting power of the human brain that is the only tool that
can reflect to generate knowledge and insights and be creative, is unbeatable.
The revolution is one of close synergy between ICT and the human brain, where
ICT amplifies the strengths and complements the weaknesses of the human brain
and vice versa.

By the way, Kasparov himself was very aware of
this and experimented with a chess game where the players were allowed to use chess
computers. Playchess.com followed up on this idea and in 2005 organized a big
tournament, where the company discovered that mid-level chess players who made
good use of average chess computers were able to beat the best chess
supercomputers as well as teams of grandmasters[1].

Today we have almost as much computing power in
our smartphones as the super-computer that beat Kasparov in 1997, and yet we
are still only at the beginning of this revolution of collaboration between
brains and computers. One of the places where this is particularly evident is
the workplace, where during most of their working day professionals do not make
the best use of their ICT to increase the performance of their brain; in fact,
it’s much worse than that, they use ICT in ways that ruin their intellectual
productivity and creativity.

For an optimal synergy between your ICT and your brain, you
need to know something about your brain.

In my next blog I will explain a few truly amazing facts
about your brain. To put this in context, I will compare your brain’s computing
power with a supercomputer that is being built to model a human brain. Ready
for a big surprise?

[1] The Chess Master and the Computer. Garry Kasparov.
The New York Review of Books. February 11, 2010.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/

We are living through an ICT revolution where if you make
good use of ICT you can increase your intellectual performance tremendously. If
on the other hand you unintentionally use ICT in the wrong way, failing to take
into account the strengths and weaknesses of the human brain, then instead of
increasing the power of your brain, you shackle it in BrainChains. Since you do
this unknowingly, I’d like to explain what science knows about how your
thinking brain works and how you can unchain your brain.

First of all, let’s be clear about the nature of this ICT
revolution: it is certainly not one where supercomputers or a network of
computers will replace the human brain. People who make this claim often use
the example of the IBM Watson computer winning in Jeopardy or the earlier
example of the IBM supercomputer “Deep Blue” beating the world chess champion
Garry Kasparov. These kinds of declarations are based on a triple ignorance:
ignorance about computers, and above all ignorance about the workings and
abilities of the amazing human brain. In this blog I will try to resolve some
of the third ignorance, so that you can use this knowledge to realize an
optimal synergy between your brain and your ICT instead of using your ICT in
ways that ruins your intellectual productivity.

Well-informed IT people do not fall into the trap of the
Newsweek article “The Brain’s Last Stand”[1],
published shortly before the Deep Blue vs Kasparov match. Quite the contrary: Let
me quote Kasparov: "The AI [Artificial Intelligence] crowd [imagined] a
computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and
intuition, [but] they got one that played like a machine, systematically
evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning
with brute number-crunching force.”

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Theo Compernolle MD.,PhD.

Independent international consultant, executive (team)coach, trainer and key-note speaker.Adjunct professor at the CEDEP European Centre for Executive Development.

Formerly Suez Chair in Leadership and Personal Development at the Solvay Business School, Adjunct Professor at INSEAD, Visiting Professor at the Vlerick School for Management and Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. More information at www.compernolle.com